Marketing Software

Technology now sits at the core of every Brand’s marketing activities.

Point solutions prevail for those brands that are still finding their way in the digital world (Microsite Software, Search Marketing Software, Marketing Communication Software etc).

As the level of sophistication grows, however, marketers find it increasingly difficult to hold all the moving parts together. At this stage, marketers are faced with 3 options:

1.       Work longer hours

2.       Grow the team

3.       Find a smarter way of working

Work smarter, not harder – Coordinate your efforts!

If your marketing sophistication is in the ascendancy and you’re wondering when you’ll find time to sleep in your efforts to stay on top of the complexity that this generates, you need a platform that pulls it all together (Marketing Professional Software).

If you can link your Capture, Engage and Convert activities in one place, you can not only streamline your processes (Marketing Workflow), you will also surface the crucial Marketing ROI that CFOs now rightly demand to justify budgets. Clear collaboration with Sales (B2B & B2C) and open visibility of Marketing's contribution to the bottom line shouldn't be aspirational - they are pre-requisites.

If your day revolves around making things happen at the last minute, juggling all the moving pieces and shouting as you go, there'll never be time to think.  

Know where you are, how you got there, what’s working (and what isn’t) and – crucially – ensure you have enough time to apply your marketing genius to the rapidly changing environment. 

Marketing platforms like Aprimo Marketing Studio enable Marketers to shine.

Anonymous to known is a key concept inside of interactive marketing in the BtoB world.  The basic approach is that once a person becomes "known" to you on your web site via a form entry, you want to collect their previously anonymous behavior with their newly created contact record. 

The value is clear, the first time someone fills out a form on your site is almost always not the first time they have spent time with your on-line content.  What they were reading, how long they were reading it, can all be valuable information pulled into the marketing process from the first contact forward.  It is the basis by which you can remain relevant in your next set of email marketing communications, landing pages, or micro-sites.  No longer should you be limited in your response based on the few fields you actually collect on the form itself.

Too often, our web analytics products are holding hostage all this valuable information.  Its' use is limited to basic web and traffic reports.  However, using today's marketing software, you can now make this web data actionable at an individual, contact level.  This will greatly expand the options for your campaigns and increase the probability you remain relevant to your prospects, and ultimately, improve your conversion rates.

Well I'm finally starting to see some of the hype subside on social marketing.  I don't want to imply that I don't see great potential for social marketing.  I just wish we didn't have to go through these euphoric hype cycles on every new concept.  Twitter is great, but only as great as the ability for everyone to get the right people to follow you and for you and everyone else to put the time into keeping it up to date.  So, perhaps the death of email marketing has been somewhat overstated. 

The good thing about social marketing (other than social marketing itself) is that it will make email marketing better.  I think most of the filters have advanced to get most of the spam out of the way.  Now, we can focus on getting the legitimate email marketers to do a better job of targeting and personalizing their email.  This will take some technology, but just as important, it will take some conviction and improved processes to support the use of the technology.

Social Media tools will continue to evolve and continue to provide a new means for connecting with customers and prospects.  But, this will force email marketing software providers to improve their tools and email marketing professionals to get better at building emails that are relevant and targeted. Nothing happens as quickly as prognosticated and usually not the way they suggest.  Emails not getting older...it's getting better!

If you have not experienced running a search advertising campaign in awhile, you might be missing out on the latest and greatest full contact sport.  It is getting crazy out there.  So many companies trying to win so many search terms both organically and paid it is truly the new Colosseum of marketing. 

Recently, with the launch of Aprimo Marketing Studio, we have begun to invest more in search advertising.  One of our battle ground topics is email marketing.  Over the past 3 months, over 2 million people searched for email marketing software.  If you add on top of this all the other derivatives (email marketing solutions, blast email marketing, business email marketing software, etc.), there are tons of searches to win and many potential prospects to capture.  However, no one, and I mean no one, can simply "buy" themselves to the top anymore.  It is just too expensive.

For example, there are so many vendors now fighting for the key email marketing terms, some clicks skyrocket to over $20 per click on a given day.  Yikes.  $20 just to get a click if you want the top position for certain terms on a given day.  In this environment, everyone needs to start having strategies that go beyond just paying more to maintain a position and include finding ways of getting your qualified traffic in the most efficient way possible.  

Once you get a click, you also need to make it count.  So, all the landing pages need to take a step up in terms of testing, quality, and conversion measurement.  Winning in this environment requires both a sophisticated strategy, a robust measurement system, and the tenacity to work on it each and every day.

To be blunt, there is no "auto pilot" in search marketing any more.  If you sit idle, you lose.  If you do not keep challenging yourself to try more, measure more, test more, you lose.  For marketing, this can be an exciting time.  There are few other marketing arenas where you get to daily compete with your top competitors.  Where you can literally "out think them" on a daily basis.  It gives marketing the feel of a true full contact sport.

I know Aprimo is not yet a favored contender in this competition.  Frankly, we have done most of our marketing through a traditional sales centric approach.  However, we love the competition.  So, here's to having a good day on the search advertising field of play.  We are happy to be here.

I’m sitting on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic working feverishly to close Q4 business while working on marketing strategy and its complementary partners of marketing plans, budgets and financial management, and spend plans. I know I’m not alone in my focus or quarterly sprint. I had the opportunity to meet with several of our customers in London at our EMEA Customer Conference and I know they shared with me that they are doing the exact same thing right now.

What did I do before Aprimo and the “Single Source of Truth”  marketing software that enables us to inspect and analyze what this year’s spend was and how it performed to drive our business?  I remember all too well what I did. I muddled through 36 versions of PowerPoint decks,  flipped and paged through volumes of Excel Spreadsheets that in the end – probably brought down at least two trees. Sigh.

 
I know I’m not alone. Just this past couple days I listened to other marketers representing the largest companies on the planet talk about how they use our marketing software to truly do more with less. It, coupled with the continued optimism that 2010 will bring us better business climate, makes up the juggling act of annual planning against quarterly results.

 
So guess what? In the end – that means I have time on the plane to write this short blog and contribute to our 2009 social media strategy that I’ll then load into our digital applications that help us manage and monetize blogging. 

Are you alone with your spreadsheets or your blogs? Which ones will drive more interest in your products or services? Let us know if you want to join the marketing innovation going on at Aprimo.

One of my clients had an interesting request while implementing our email marketing software.  Most of my clients have at least one interesting request per project and that is why I am here.  The client wanted to provide a specific email response sent out based on what embedded links the target prospect clicked on in the initial email.

Often, when a marketer embeds URLs in emails, we (I am a marketer, too) just count the clicks and pat ourselves on the back because we received a response.  Yeah, success!  But clicks can provide so many more possibilities - if you can make them actionable.

Actionable clicks are clicks that drive subsequent actions.  Sure, I used the same word that I am defining in the definition, but you get the idea.  In this case, depending on what the target prospect clicked on in the email, the appropriate next email and dynamic content was sent in response. 

If the prospect clicked on two URLs, he or she was sent email version A.  If the prospect clicked on two other URLs, then email version B.  If he or she clicked some of each set, then email version C was sent.  All emails sent with personalized and dynamic content.  This was all done within the context of a Dialogue or multi-step communication plan in our product - moving the email recipient from a prospect to become a marketing qualified lead.  

So think beyond the Click and take action based on clicks to create a dialogue with your customers.

As a company, Aprimo spent many years in a software category (marketing resource management) that most marketers knew little about.  This category focused on the "back office" of marketing, helping the marketer manage their projects, their budget, and their marketing assets.  However, most marketing organizations 10 years ago did this with spreadsheets and file systems (and many of them still do today!  p.s. we still would like to talk to you!).

When you live in a category for a long time that does not have general awareness, you get addicted to outbound marketing.  This is because you are constantly having to "reach out" to educate someone about what you do, why it is important, and why they should care.

Times have changed at Aprimo, and now we are serving many markets that have ready, willing buyers looking to solve the problems they have today with software we offer.  However, it is interesting that our marketing was slow to change.  We became addicted to outbound.  Even though there are many marketers now looking to solve problems like email marketing, search engine marketing, campaign management, and more, we have built an engine that tries to "call everyone" asking if they want to solve the problem vs. putting up a sign saying "we solve this" and letting them find us.

Ok, a sign is a simplistic example.  However, effective PPC campaigns are just not something we think first about.  For instance, there were 700,000 people looking for "email marketing software" this month.  However, we never seriously tried to win that search term.  Instead, we will place millions into channels calling people about email marketing hoping they happen to be one of the 700,000 that already told us they were looking via search.

Times are changing at Aprimo and so is our marketing approach.  In the coming months, we are going to be investing more and more on inbound channels.  However, habits are hard to break and this change does not come easily.  I imagine we are not the only company struggling to break such habits!

 

Maybe you already "got milk," but that's not all you need in life. Experts say we need a balanced diet of dairy, protein, grains, fruits and vegetables. You wouldn't try to survive on only one of these. You'd run into all kinds of problems if you only ate ground beef or blueberries. You know better, so you try to include every food group.

I hope you also know better than to think you're set for life if you're using marketing software that addresses one, tiny area of your marketing organization. Yes, it may be improving your outbound marketing and lead distribution efforts, but what about your materials and inventory? You may have a microsite builder, but are you working on search engine optimization or PPC Advertising?

We do software, and if you do collateral we can help. If you and your team realize that much already, half the battle is behind you. Are you looking for collateral customization software? Collateral management software? Marketing collateral software? Marketing collateral management software? Digital asset management software? Brand content management software? (Phew.) No matter what you call it, we do it.

James Gilchrist, a Graphics Designer at Aprimo and one of my coworkers, may be talking about this functionality so check out his posts for more information.

I have been learning a lot about marketing automation software and I will be the first to say as a marketer from a different world, I see the merits of it in streamlining effectiveness and creating great marketing efficiencies. I have a MAJOR gripe though! If you are reading this blog post the day it was published, then it is October 6. I am on the open sea on a Carnival cruise ship - no! that is not my gripe! My gripe is that due to all of this automating...I was "afforded the opportunity" to work ahead and keep my blog new and updated. With the instant gratification of social media marketing - how can you afford not to?

The days of "when I return from vacation, I'll get right on that" don't apply anymore. Marketers have to be bionic - work at the speed of light to front load content so companies don't skip a beat. The beauty lies in the return from vacation - software automation has pushed you to work ahead so your company doesn't miss a beat and neither do you.

For you marketers out there who think your company may fall apart if you aren't there churning the daily grind - perhaps marketing software automation is your answer!
Consider it paying yourself forward so you aren't buried when you return.  Speaking of buried, I had better go hit the sand!
 

One of my favorite classes in college was Principles of Advertising. The section I found the most interesting covered subliminal advertising. It was fascinating to study how logos were embedded into images, like the Disney reference below. I think its brilliant.


My friends and I spent a lot of time looking for others; pondering whether or not one of the first bottled waters, Evian was deliberately named to backwards spell Naive. Cool, right? I think so...perhaps that's where my geekiness comes in. Hey - maybe I DO fit at Aprimo!!

I love entertaining the idea that marketing can play with our subconscious...if only we listened to that subconscious more! I can't tell you how many times I knew I needed a better way to track projects and lead development or manage marketing finances...those nagging thoughts that aren't annoying enough to be conscious, but they bug the heck out of your subconscious. I knew I needed these things to prove my ROI in marketing to my boss and others and yet, I subconsciously fought against them.

Do you do this? Should I push my graphic designer to start creating subliminal marketing collateral that speaks to your subconscious instead of the conscious self that is fighting an internal battle? One more fun subliminal post for fun....

Not that we needed any more data points, but Adobe's planned purchase of Omniture is further validation of the alignment of web analytics in the marketing process.  Interactive marketers already know that web analytics is a key technology to understand prospect and customer behavior and ultimately tie conversion events (lead quality, sales) back to the underlying acquisition and engagement strategies that drove the results.  Yes, the holy grail of closed-loop ROI reporting...

Aprimo Marketing Studio leverages the power of best-of-breed web analytics tools to fully integrate web analytics into the campaign planning and execution process.   Aprimo Marketing Studio can integrate into all web analytics tool but has a deep, API level integration with Omniture.

Omniture's web analytics system (Site Catalyst) and search marketing software (Search Center) are accessible directly from the Marketing Studio interface giving users access to the full functionality of these industry-leading online optimization technologies. 

Internally, there is debate on how we price our email software.  For Aprimo Marketing Studio, for our email marketing software, we charge an aggregate fee for the amount of email you send (the more you send, the higher the fee).  Some of our competitors charge by "CER" or customer equivalent records.  The issue is, which model is better for the customer?

Our competitors like to point out (I am sure they are just being helpful) that charging for emails sent, penalizes the customer for success.  In essence, the more you send email (or use the system), the more you pay.  Wouldn't it be better to just go to an "all you can eat" model instead for email marketing?  It just so happens, they believe they represent such a model.

This argument brings me back to the lure of the all inclusive resort.  The idea is, pay one fee, and you can eat and drink, as much as you want, anywhere on the resort for "free."  It does not matter if you are a big eater or a small eater.  The ultimate "all you can eat" setup.  The "free" in this case, being covered by the fee included in your resort charge (just like our competitors seem to forget where their "free" is located - this fee is often more expensive than the per meal plan - but lets set that point aside).  

The problem with this setup from the vendor side is that there is real cost to serving food.  Given the real costs in purchasing and serving food, and by including all such items outside of a direct fee, the resort becomes challenged in justifying spending too much money on food.  They have taken what should be aligned to revenue (food) and make it a pure cost center.  The result, all that "free food" on the resort starts to taste like it, as the company seeks creative ways to cut costs and improve margins on what is now managed by the concept of "what can we get away with for food and still sell resort fees."

There is also real cost in managing email deliverability.  There are real investments in people and technology that are directly related to the volume of email being sent.  Once you take away any direct revenue tied to these expenses and move them to a pure cost model, the same issue occurs.  The email software company continues to find ways to "cut cost" from their email deliverability services and it becomes a "what is the minimum we need to do to cover deliverability and still get away with charging our software fees."  The result, all the "free" email starts to taste (I mean bounce) like it.

So, will we always have the same revenue model for email?  I am not sure.  If the customer ultimately demands the all you can eat resort and can tolerate a "cost center" approach to deliverability, we might eventually need to change to market demand.  I believe you are always best served when your vendor's costs & revenue are aligned to your end goals.  I am not sure how many email marketers really want to invest in email software that is not fully aligned to the reliable delivery of their email.

Wow.  I just read this great article on the effectiveness of Social Media specifically Facebook and it made me realize the vast possibilities for my organization. Take a minute to read Facebook's frighteningly impressive ad potential and see what I mean.  I realize this article is geared more for the B2C then the B2B but I think that is changing even as we speak. 

Yes, social media marketing is one piece of the pie, yet tying it to specific offline activity is key.  As a marketer responsible for Lead Generation, it is one thing to get alot of leads but it is quite another to actually have the majority of those leads be highly qualified. My goal is to create a healthy sales funnel and consequent sales pipeline.   Now, with lead scoring every lead you receive can be a high quality lead.  So, when will we initiate trigger marketing based on where someone goes on our Facebook or website?  Now is the answer!

What is cool is the ability to send a person a highly personal communique which then links out to a specific microsite or purl.  They get to then be engaged with marketing content relevant to them and all the while we are scoring them on thier behavior and determining our next line of communication.  Kind of like predicitive modeling.  Yes, digital marketing has taken on a whole new life and it is time to join the fun but don't just jump in, be deliberate, methodical and open to change.  Make sure your technology for karketing is the best... meaning use a robust, easy to use marketing software tool.  We use Aprimo Marketing Studio and love it.  What do you use?

This week I had an interesting conversation with a lady I first met on Live Chat.  She told me she was looking to learn more about how our marketing software can help her company with their online marketing efforts.  She liked our Live Chat feature yet early in the chat she was a bit hesitant.  I asked if she would prefer I call her and immediately received her telephone number on the screen.  I called and we discussed her needs. 

In the discussion, she said that while she is the Project Manager leading the effort to find a marketing automation solution, she was not comfortable typing through a conversation.  She also mentioned she was not one to "text" either.  :)  After some discussion around her needs with offers, microsites and landing pages, I was able to direct her to the District Manager in her area to assist her further. 

If you are not comfortable typing through a conversation on Live Chat, you can always ask us to call you.  You may also call our company at 317 803-4300, email us at info@aprimo.com, or fill out a form online at aprimo.com.  Just let us know how to reach you so we can assist you with your marketing management needs. 

I have a big confession to make. I am completely un-American. I say this because unlike majority of the population - I have absolutely NO interest in car shopping....not only do I have no interest, I pretty much hate it. I want a car that runs and gets me from A to B and sure - I have preferences on style, make and model, but I have no real interest in actually shopping for it. I would prefer someone take my money and go purchase me a car and say, "Here you go...drive this for the next ten years and then I will come back and shop for you again." Perfect!

I see this in companies that I work with all of the time. They are not in the driver's seat when it comes to marketing. They have no desire to do it and yet, they know that A. they need it and B. that they have a preference on how it gets done, just little interest in implementing it. These companies view marketing as a chore - enter marketing technology. Enter Aprimo Marketing Studio.

Our job here is complete those chores - be the Tylenol for the CMO. Marketers are pushed further and faster, to deliver more, in a time of budget cuts and department downsizing. You have to be effective and efficient and you can't do it all. I will be the first to say that we can't do it ALL, but our marketing software is a robust engine- it can help with social media management, web analytics solutions, microsites, and marketing lead management.

Consider it the dashboard that holds the keys to your marketing success and can drive your marketing engine.

So...let's go for a drive....

AAA0 stands for 'anytime, anywhere, anyhow, bar nothing.'  My high school swim coach used this motto to rally our team to a state championship.  Lots of good memories!  

I sometimes feel like companies take this same mindset and approach when marketing to me as a customer.  It happens to all of us.  AAA0 marketing is a bit bothersome, but what's getting all the attention these days is the pervasiveness of behavioral profiling in the digital age.  Many perfectly normal people are saying "don't trespass on my digital real estate unless I've invited you to do so."
 
As interactive marketers, we face this challenge every day!  The problem is we haven't had the interactive marketing software we need to manage the holistic experience of every interaction with our customers, starting with understanding their anonymous digital profile all the way through the point(s) of conversion, and most importantly - respecting their preferences along the way. 
 

Fortunately, this is changing.  Today's available marketing management software, such as Aprimo's Marketing Studio, allows us to perform AAAP marketing - anytime, anywhere, anyhow, but with an understanding of one's preferences and with their permission.

The great thing about marketing is you get to experience all types of it everyday, so learning never stops.  The worse thing about marketing is everyone else gets to experience all sides of it everyday as well so "feedback" never seems to stop either!  BTW, a similar thing could be said about developing marketing software, so we are in the same boat!

Case in point, it was time to update my son's laptop.  I did what most consumers do today, I turned to the web to start researching some options.  I read some blogs from the social media savvy looking for reviews, I checked out numerous web sites/ landing pages / microsites, and I even started noticing some of the on-line advertising (banner ads) that kept popping up.  As I did this, I realized many of the companies that had a chance to influence my next purchase had still fallen short.

One glaring gap from a marketing perspective I saw during this search was around "loyalty marketing".  Where were those loyalty emails from all the companies I had done business with in the past offering upgrade specials?  Then I realized, not one of the vendors I did business with ever asked me about my typical upgrade cycle.  I never saw the question "How often do you upgrade your PC?".  As marketers, it seems like we would all love to know when our customers would be "in the market" again for a purchase.  One straight forward way to find out, it seems, would be to simply ask your customer.  However, out of the half dozen vendors I used for PC equipment, it appears none of them bothered to find out.  With that data missing, it appears they also lacked the timing to launch a series of loyalty offers during my latest search.  Did they have to hit it on the day?  No, I probably would have remembered such offers over the past several months.  However, none had appeared.  That seemed to me to be a real missed opportunity.

To me, this is a classic example of skipping the simple things in pursuit of the more complex.  All of these vendors had relatively modern web sites, integrated reviews, banner ads, and more.  However, none of them were asking the simple questions during product registration to advance their marketing in one key area, making it timely.

...yes it's true. 'Cover Girl' not as in a model, but as one who is constantly running for cover! I work for Aprimo, an online marketing powerhouse, as the Manager of Lead Generation.  I can tell you that more times then not, we have been bombarded through our Live Chat.  Someone comes on our Web site, probably through the assistance of our Search Engine Marketing tools and by using my web analytics tools, I can see them.  I can then initiate a conversation or wait for them to reach out to me. 

One day, this person initiates a live chat acting as the CEO of one of our competitors, (like we wouldn't know his name) and then proceeds to ask for a cheeseburger.  This technology is great, but it does release some crazies!  I wish our Marketing Software could detect the fool hearty as they hit our site so we can dispense them quickly. Now, wouldn't that be cool?  

The ability to have something instantaneous, like an answer, is something our Interactive Marketing is trying to foster.  I think we need to create a whole new lead nurturing cycle for these 'Chats'.  Yes, that is what I will work on today.  Developing my leads through multi-directional campaigns using Multichannel Marketing. Since my Interactive Marketing software tells me where my chat is coming from, all I would need from that point is their name because email configurations are usually quite easy to find.  Then, I could actually create a campaign workflow around these inbound marketing opportunities and really focus on lead nurturing and account development. 

Believe you me, it sounds a lot more complicated then it is.  Marketing Automation, you gotta love it.   How do you handle those people who hit your site to chat?  Or do you even chat?

 

As CMO, Arthur combines her expertise in CRM Applications, Software as a Service (SaaS) and customer-driven marketing with Aprimo’s leadership in Marketing Software. 

Aprimo® Inc., a leading global provider of on-demand marketing software solutions, announced that it is enhancing its management team with the addition of Chief Marketing Officer, Lisa Arthur.

"Lisa is an outstanding addition to our Aprimo team,” said co-founder and CEO Bill Godfrey. “Lisa is laser focused on customers and market-driven strategies to drive value and growth. This, combined with her expertise in branding, on-demand strategy and demand generation, is a great complement to Aprimo and our intense focus on helping marketers improve their effectiveness, efficiencies and their shareholder value. We are excited to have Lisa join the Aprimo team.”

Arthur has over 25 years of global leadership experience, achieving high marketing metrics for large technology companies including Oracle & Akamai Technologies. As the VP of Global CRM- Marketing for Oracle, Arthur was able to carve the company's entry into the CRM market in the late 90s, and grow Oracle to become a leading applications provider. Arthur also led Oracle's Services Marketing group, and was responsible for re-positioning and driving triple digit growth in the Software as a Service market. Arthus then joined Akamai as CMO, steering market strategies and positioning, invigorating the brand and helping Akamai grow from $160 million to over $300 million in annual revenue. 

Most recently, in a quest to improve the traction of marketing within high-tech companies, Arthur co-founded Cinterim, a San Francisco-based company offering Interim Chief Marketing Officer Services to small to mid-sized companies. In that role, she helped drive market creation, positioning and strategies for several start-ups and Fortune 20 companies.

As CMO for Aprimo, Arthur assumes immediate responsibility for its overall market strategy, branding, demand generation, and Marketing ROI optimization.

 “Aprimo is the best kept secret in Marketing and I'm thrilled to be on the executive team of the world's best marketing software company. I will be working globally with our customers to better understand how they are leveraging Aprimo to run some of the most sophisticated and innovative marketing programs on the planet,” said Arthur. “And then my goal will be to share with the world how the best marketers capitalize on the power and capabilities of Aprimo.”

Arthur is a seasoned key note speaker on topics including, but not limited to Web 2.0, CRM strategies, SEO optimization, new product strategy, and brand identity. Subscribe to Lisa's blog to read more about her and her marketing thought leadership.

 

...seems to be what we hear from our kids daily! Now, it is coming not just from our deparment co-workers, but from our prospects, too. Ok, so getting what you want, when you want it sounds like our Interactive Marketing Software is working...but does it really mean our interactive department is too?  I pose the question based on an experience I just had a day ago.

A guy hits our site, through a pay per click, and fills out an interactive form and downloads a whitepaper.  Three minutes later, he calls me and demands to know where that whitepaper is.  The tongue lashing from the guy wasn't pleasant until he realized that once he submitted his information, a thank you page that popped up for him had the link to the paper. Even more interesting is I find out, over the phone, that while he is interested in the whitepaper, he really wanted more information on Pay Per Click Manegement, Banner Ad creation and Web Analytics Solutions as well but couldn't find anything on our site.  Well, becuase of my Web Analytical Management tools I could easily see that he visited 2 pages!

Here is the dilemna, people want what they want when they want it but if the information they are seeking isn't sitting on the candy shelf next to the register then are they really going to look?  So, how do we present to them our core compentencies and their interests without losing them from the first page? 

What do you do?